PUBLIC SCHOOLS AND "CASTE" T HE labour unrest and the Daily
Mail in combination have given some well-known novelists the opportunity to offer us their thoughts on the present distress. The effect is rather like that of an illuminated fountain at an Earl's Court exhibition ; the thought of the eminent novelists plays on the fountain of unrest and colours it with radiant and variegated hues. One is much more conscious of the lights than of the fountain; yet the fountain is the real thing, and it remains a fountain with its enormous hissing pressure when the lights have been turned, off. Novelists—for it is their business— try to understand what is called in the cant phrase of the day the psychology of the question. When the psychology has been discovered all is explained. But when one has read more than one set of psychological explanations one begins to protest to oneself that the variegated and highly contradictory lights do not, after all, affect the fountain. Here we have Mr. Galsworthy bringing the whole unrest to the test of two psychological conditions. One is what he calla the fiduciary element in the conduct of commercial enterprise and landed estates, and the other is the cultivation of " caste " in the public schools. When he speaks of the fiduciary element he draws attention to the fact that the immediate and the ultimate employers of the workers are not the same people. The old personal relation between the employer and his staff ceased with the industrial revolution. Now the immediate employer is a manager of works and the ultimate employers are shareholders in a company. No doubt it is very difficult to surprise human sympathy linking in the glades of all this very complicated industrial association. Why Mr. Galsworthy should mention landed estates in one breath with commercial enterprises we do not, however, quite understand unless ho thinks that land agents are generally beyond the control of landowners. Industry is controlled, it is true, not by the multitude of proprietors—for that is im- possible—but by salaried trustees. " Which of us does not know," asks Mr. Galsworthy, " the deflecting power of trusteeship, rigidified as it is by the law and by the sense that we are paid for the performance of a job inimical to generosity ? " Some of us who happen to be trustees in the ordinary sense may think that we have not acted without generosity in accepting the post ; but let that pass, though Mr. Galsworthy's analogy is not morally of the happiest. If trusteeship in Mr. Galsworthy's sense -wilts all humanity in the relations of capital and labour, be will admit, perhaps, that the process of getting rid of private ownership in favour of State ownership (which inevitably brings in the fiduciary element) had better be checked at once.
From discussing the absence of altruism in the prosperous classes under the trustee system of industrialism it is a quick and easy transition to turn to the education of the prosperous classes, which should—but does not, as Mr. Galsworthy thinks—supply the altruism. He says that our public schools encourage instincts of caste that forbid sympathy and understanding between the well-to-do and the poorer classes.
"How far are the legions at our private and public schools (those legions from whom the ranks of Capital are, in the main, recruited) made to understand, and—more than understand—to feel that they are fortunate, that Labour is less fortunate, that they will have to live their lives in interdependence with Labour, and that if they do not make, and out of a free and fine heart make, the first advances to good-fellowship with less fortunate Labour, those advances can—by a law, and a good law, of human nature—never bo made? How far are they at present brought up in this faith P I would go so far as to say—not at all. In my day at a public school—and I have no reason at all to hope that, what- ever be the exceptions, the general rule has changed—the Universe was divided into ourselves and `outsiders,' `bounders; chews; • 'cads,' or whatever more or less offensive name best seemed. to us to characterize those less fortunate than ourselves."
Mr. Galsworthy must have had an unfortunate experience. We should think that at his school the unhappy mental state he deschibes must have been temporary. We suspect that every generation is self-consciously afraid that it is failing in the very matter in which its best achievements lie. The people who left behind them vivid memories of foppish- ness were haunted by the misgiving that they were not paying enough attention to their dress or their manners. A. robustious ago morbidly dreads that it may be thought timid. Similarly to-day the feature of educated life is the conscience- stricken fear of failing in social service just when there are more schemes for social service than ever before distinguished educated men. Our grandfathers knew hardly anything of such schemes. King Edward VII., when be was Prince of Wales, invented for himself the r6le of patron of philan- thropy and collector of funds for good works. No previous Heir to the. Throne had ever troubled himself about such things Mr. Galsworthy proclaims himself a pessimist, but this is pessimism in the tenth degree to say that public-school boys are contemptuous of the working man. Possibly Mr. Gals- worthy's school did not support a "mission" in some poor part of a city. The writer remembers that at his own school there were searchings of heart when a party of visitors from the mission visited the school (in pursuit of the ideal of keeping the two institutions in touch) because some of the boys were afraid that the visitors, to judge from their clothes, were " too respectable," The phrase may have been too short- sighted, but at all events it implied a genuine enough mis- giving that help was not being given where it was most needed. If this was the bearing of public-school boys towards those below them, we may perhaps take as characteristic of their bearing towards those above them the Harrow story about the Italian duke. When it was arranged that this duke, then a boy at Harrow, should succeed eventually to the Spanish throne—an arrangement which was not carried out-- all the boys in the school, according to the story, solemnly kicked him in order that they might be able to say in after years that they had kicked a king. It is a pity that the course of European history deprived so many vicarages, business offices, and regimental messes of the full poignancy of this gratifying recollection.
But we are not sure that we have rightly understood Mr.
Galsworthy. After the curious passage we have quoted he says : " It is true that we applied the name to the lower ranks of capital rather than to actual labour. . . . Such work- ing folk as we actually came into personal contact with we never dreamed of associating with any such offensive thought in our minds, or speech on our tongues ; but, generically, the working man did not exist for us except as something outside, remote, unpleasant — almost inimical." Mr. Galsworthy seems to be rather confused. The " lower ranks of capital " must mean small shopkeepers and such like, and if these ranks are alienated—if there is any resentment among them against the rich for spending their money on unnecessary • things—we have not heard of it.
According to Mr. Galsworthy the public-school boy who resists the influence of " the groat caste factory—a public, school "—becomes "a ' smug' or Radical." At what public school is a boy called a "smug" because he sympathizes with the poor P As we are told that public-school boys never come into contact with the poor it follows that they could not judge what any particular boy's relation to the poor might be unless, of course, the boy went about assuring them all that he sympathized with the poor and that they did not. We never met or heard of a boy of this kind. At all schools, except Mr. Galsworthy's, a " smug " is a boy who does not accept the conventions of schoolboy life—the exaggeration of athletic prestige, the unwritten rules as to dress and manners, and the proper con- tempt for the mark-grubber. The only Radicals the writer remembers at school were boys at the head of the school, distinguished in work and games, who made an intellectual and a rather arrogant pose of their Radicalism. Mr. Galsworthy says that in improving the relations between the more fortunate and the less fortunate the first advances must obviously come from the fortunate. The difficulty of many men of sensitive and delicate perception is the fear that their advances may have an intolerable air of patronage. They recognize the self-respect of the British working man which is an abiding reality, and heartily respect it. It is only too easy to speak of comradeship in general terms, but when it comes to the practice of it is it really possible that people of different points of view, different interests, different education, different manners, different speech, should consort continually together with perfect enjoyment P Let us put aside all questions of superiority.
There is difference enough between the types to create a wearing sense of strain. The strain or boredom might well be much greater on the part of the poor man than on that of the more fortunate. An educated man of
tact might conquer the situation with apparent ease if not with secret comfort, but the less tactful would blunder into the atrocious impertinences of Mrs. Pardiggle in " Bleak House." Every reader of the chapter called " Covering a
Multitude of Sins" will remember the visit to the brickfields and the maddening complacency of Mrs. Pardiggle, who was "never tired " by the resentment she provoked.
Yon can't tire me, good people,' said Mrs. Pardiggle to these latter. 'I enjoy bard work ; and the harder you make mine, the better I like it: Then make it easy for her !' growled the man upon the floor. I wants it done, and over. I wants a end of these liberties took with my place. I wants a end of being drawed like a badger. Now you're a-going to poll-pry and question according to custom—I know what you're a-going to be up to. Well ! You haven't got no occasion to be up to it. 111 save you the trouble. Is my daughter a-washin P Yes, she is a-washin. Look at the water. Smell it! That's wit we drinks. How do you like it, and what do you think of gin, instead ! An't my place dirty ? Yes, it is dirty—it's nat'rally dirty, and it's nat'rally unwholesome ; and we've had five dirty and onwholesome children, as is all dead infants, and so much the better for them, and for us besides. Have I read the little book wet you left P No, I an't read the little book wet you left. There an't nobody here as knows how to road it ; and if there wos, it wouldn't be suitable to me. It's a book fit for a babby, and I'm not a babby. If you was to leave me a doll I shouldn't nuss it. How have I been conducting of myself P Why, I've been drunk for three days ; and I'd a been drunk four, if I'd a had the money. Don't I never mean for to go to church P No, I don't never mean for to go to church. I shouldn't be expected there, if I did ; the beadle's too genteel for me. And how did my wife get that black eye P Why, I giv' it her ; and if she says I didn't, she's a Lie!' He had pulled his pipe out of his mouth to say all this, and ho now turned over on his other side, and smoked again. Mrs. Pardiggle, who had been regarding him through her spectacles with a forcible com- posure, calculated, I could not help thinking, to increase his antagonism, pulled out a good book, as if it wore a constable's staff, and took the whole family into custody. I mean into religious custody, of course; but she really did it, as if she were an inexorable moral Policeman carrying them all off to a station- house."
As Biddy reminded Pip in " Great Expectations " when he wanted to raise Old Joe part paesu with his own rise in fortune: "Oh, there are many kinds of pride . . . he may be too proud to let any one take him out of a place that he is com- petent to fill, and fills well and with respect." Not long ago we noticed a capital school story called " Fathers of Men," by Mr. Hornung, which was a penetrating commentary on the mental workings of the public-school boy. The hero was the son of a groom, and the training he had received from his superior relations on his mother's side made him anxious to con- ceal his humble origin on his father's aide. When he had caused himself much quite unnecessary anxiety about his "secret" he at last recognized that "it wouldn't have mattered as much as I thought it would : things about your people or anything that ever happened anywhere else don't hurt or help much in a place like this. It's what you can do and how you take things that matters here." Quite true. The boy at last won his place in the sun becaused he turned out to be a natural left-hand bowler 1
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